Review: 'Winter's Bone'

Ree Dolly, a poor-as-dirt, tough-as-nails 17-year-old with an absent dad and a crazy mom, takes care of her kid brother and sister in the crank-addicted hollows of the Ozarks.

Then, one winter's day, a sheriff arrives to say her father's due in court on drug charges, and if he doesn't show up, well, "y'all gonna lose this place," because Daddy put their ramshackle home up as bond. Ree announces that she'll find him, and the grit in her expression brooks no argument. She'll find him.

What she discovers in her search is a mystery. What we discover is the best American film of the year so far: "Winter's Bone," Debra Granik's naturalistic and fantastically gripping saga of deep-seated crime and hardship in one chilling patch of Missouri. From a bleak premise and grimmer-than-grim elements - trash-filled yards, hate-filled faces, lives chewed away by the scourge of methamphetamine - "Winter's Bone" spins a top-notch, low-rent Southern gothic conspiracy thriller about a gutsy young heroine navigating a perilous web of secrets and lies.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree. A teenager during production (she'll turn 20 this August), Lawrence delivers a performance of ferocious, fully mature self-possession that recalls the young Jodie Foster.

In scene after scene, she holds her own against a cast of older stand-outs: John Hawkes, as an unstable, meth-addicted uncle; Kevin Breznahan, as a sleazy drug lord; William White, as the monstrous capo of the family; Dale Dickey, as a plain-talking woman who redefines kindness, if that's what it is.

The whole movie speaks plainly, and not much. Adapted by Granik and Anne Rosellini from the novel by Daniel Woodrell, "Winter's Bone" won the Grand Jury Prize for drama at this year's Sundance. It's a film of few words, showing rather than telling the plot's biggest shockers - aided by a few moody string tremolos and spare bits of traditional music. Pervading everything is a kind of backwoods omerta, a distrust of language and sense of its futility; why bother talking, when a choke hold or a line of meth says it best?

Michael McDonough's cinematography has the same unvarnished, quasi-documentary realism he brought to Granik's first feature, 2004's "Down to the Bone," another stark wintry drama pocked with drugs. The setting in that film is upstate New York, but its kinship with this one - in the osseous title and feminine perspective - is hard to miss. With "Winter's Bone," Granik has morphed from a director worth watching to one who demands our undivided attention.

-- Advisory: Some drug material, language and violent content.

E-mail Amy Biancolli at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle